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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26718046">Worm on a Hook</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dragonkeeper14/pseuds/Dragonkeeper14'>Dragonkeeper14</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Action/Adventure, Fantasy, Gen, Horror, Mentor/Protégé</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 07:53:51</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,125</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26718046</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dragonkeeper14/pseuds/Dragonkeeper14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>In which the young hero-in-training, Nathan Ransom, recounts his thoughts about a brief encounter with the horrors beyond imagination…</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Worm on a Hook</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Everything was dark on all sides; I couldn’t tell if my eyes were open or not. Then, suddenly, I could, because I could see things. For a moment, I thought I really was seeing things, and then I realized I was seeing real things, but they looked nothing like any real thing I’d ever seen. Those were my thoughts, put all together:<br/>
‘O my Gawd, I can’t see anything!<br/>
O my Gawd; I see something.<br/>
O my Gawd! I’m seeing things!<br/>
O, my Gawd. I really am seeing things.<br/>
O my Gawd! What are these things?!’.<br/>
“Things” was the best word I had for them. Huge, strange things. </p><p>	At first, I didn’t see anything. Then, I saw something glowing in the dark. A moment later, there was another one next to it. Then another, then another, then another, and more and more and more;–– they were all eyes! And they were all looking straight at me! </p><p>	Then another set of eyes opened nearby, and I realized: the first thousand all belonged to the same set! There were only two creatures! Or were there? Before I knew what was happening, there were more. And not just eyes; now, I could see they had bodies, bigger than even the eyes would've made me think, and shaped in ways I didn't know bodies could be. I was surrounded. I might’ve been a worm on a hook, surrounded by fish. I sure felt like one. This has to be what a worm on a hook feels, if it’s not drowned or stabbed right from the beginning: lowered into someplace it’s not supposed to be, hanging on the slenderest thread imaginable with giant monster things all around, which look like nothing it’s ever seen (if worms could see), but all look menacing. I didn’t need anyone to tell me, if those things were as dangerous to me as a fish to a worm, I was monster-bait, and stood as little a chance as the worm against the fish. </p><p>	I was just as mystified, too; whatever those things were, they were as alien to me as fish to a worm: something which had always been “out there”, in some space I knew nothing about and where creatures like me couldn’t normally go, or even know to exist, because we don’t have the senses, or even the instruments to see the place, let alone the living things in it, and because it co-exists with our own space, but for the most part doesn’t enter it, even when the stuff of our space and the stuff of the other make each other habitable;–– water and land, in my worm comparison. I mean, water makes land habitable, and run-off from land makes water habitable, but land-creatures drown under too much water (whatever too much is, for a species), and water-creatures dry out on land, so each has a little mixed in the other, but not too much and not too little. Goldilocks zone. But worms, if they’re lucky, live in (relatively) dry land, and never see a water-creature in their lives. The same goes for us in our world, or our reality, or whatever we call it. Maybe our reality needs something from the other to be habitable, like land needing water, and maybe the other needs run-off from us; but something evolved to live in ours, is just monster-bait if it falls into the other. I’m calling them monsters, because that’s all I could think of. What they were, I have no idea. I bet a worm would say the same, if worms could talk, about fish, if it came back alive to tell the tale to other worms. </p><p>	Anyway, all this was going through my head while I was “hanging” there, looking at the darkness, and the darkness was looking back at me. Half of me wanted to see them clearly, and the other half wished I was a zillion miles away in the center of whatever made up what I’d always called the Real World. Pun not intended.</p><p>	Then, it happened. A huge movement in the dark, and something wicked my way came (yeah, that's a famous quote); what, I don’t know. It might’ve been a limb. Just like a worm on a hook, who has no limbs and barely knows what one looks like, I don’t have whatever that organ was, and nor can I explain it to any of you, who (presumably) don’t either. All I know is, it was big and dangerous-looking, and if it had touched me I wouldn’t be here to set all this down. I’ll always think a worm feels the same, when it sees the fish opening wide to bite the bait. Then someone yelled, ‘Nathan! Over here!’, and I felt something grab me, and I was out of the darkness and on dry land again, with Traroth and Clipson looking down at me. </p><p>	When I had all my brains in order again, I asked: ‘What was that place? And what were those things in it?’.</p><p>	All Clipson said was, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn”.</p><p>	I asked: ‘Which means, What?’.</p><p>	He answered: ‘Nothing. It’s a password of sorts among fans of a Gothic novelist with the unlikely name of Howard P. Lovecraft. His stories often deal in huge and strange extra-terrestrial presences. The dread Kulhu was one of them, and that line of gibberish is translated, in the story, </p><p>“In his house of R’lyeh, the dread Kulhu waits dreaming”.</p><p>	The story tells of a sunken city, built for giants, with only a single inhabitant left: the dread Kulhu himself. He was a sort of monster, who lay in an eternal sleep until woken by some foolhardy sailors, when an earthquake raised his city out of the water. He killed most of them, purely by accident (as you or I might step on ants, when walking out the door); the survivors got back aboard the ship, came about, and steered its sharp prow right into the monster’s evil heart. With a great crash and splash, he dissolved into a splatter of green slime, and fell upon the surface of the ocean. Dismayed, one supposes, by his own vulnerability, he pulled himself together, and sank back into the city, which sank with him, never to rise again. </p><p>	I told you once before, young Nathan, the human race is not an apex predator; and so, we are always afraid of something greater than ourselves, lurking where we cannot see it, to rise and strike when we least expect, with powers beyond our worst nightmares. I have seen it too, when I was about your age’.</p><p>	I said: ‘But they're real; those things in the dark!’.</p><p>	He answered: ‘Does that mean people can’t tell stories about it?’.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Any questions? Comments? Suggestions? Criticism? Threats of violence? Let me know!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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